Fergie's Tech Blog

Surveillance Infrastructure Creeps Forward in D.C.

Jim Harper writes on The Technology Liberation Front:

The D.C. Examiner reported yesterday that the D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles plans to embed drivers’ licenses with SmarTrip chips, the RFID chips increasingly used to access the Metro system.

This is another step taken to make Metro access more convenient - oh, and more subject to surveillance.

The SmarTrip card is an RFID-chipped card that controls access to Metro stations and deducts fares from users’ card-based accounts.

Metro has long encouraged people to register their cards, because this allows lost cards to be cancelled and new ones issued, preserving the value of the lost card. Registration of the card, of course, allows Metro to correlate use of the card with a particular person. It’s a bearer document, but a SmarTrip card is usually used by the same person, which is usually the person who registered it.

posted by Fergie @ 11/07/2007 05:37:00 PM